It’s a piece by SF mayoral candidate Jane Kim … calling the SF Chronicle out on their attempted hatchet job.

One of her questions back:

”Why didn’t you fact check the false assertions contained in these questions against publicly available information before contacting me or choosing to move forward with this story?”

Which resulted in them not runing with the story at all …. this is their response

Politico reporting how Seattle, San Francisco et al are too expensive to live in because highly paid tech people are arriving and pushing up the prices.

Those same tech people are very quick to preach that the Future of Work is virtual.

Is it that what is good for the goose is not good for the gander?

Great read - and spot on …

“And this leads to my second reaction, which is the deepest impatience and frustration with IndieWeb itself for having developed tools to very literally revolutionize the web, but then continuing to not strive for a level of public visibility beyond that of model-train enthusiasts, perhaps, or ham-radio clubs. Smart, motivated people gathering regularly in the shared pleasure of their craft, with these quiet gatherings having negligible effect on the world at large.

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I really want to work out how to elevate the conversation and get to a wider audience …. the challenge I think is that we don’t have sufficient weight / experience of people in the community that understand how to Cross The Chasm.

As I said … they will be back ….

”In recent months, executives at Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group, along with the Mercer family, have moved to created a new firm, Emerdata, based in Britain, according to British records. The new company’s directors include Johnson Ko Chun Shun, a Hong Kong financier and business partner of Erik Prince. Mr. Prince founded the private security firm Blackwater, which was renamed Xe Services after Blackwater contractors were convicted of killing Iraqi civilians.”

Just didn’t quite expect them to include Blackwater this time round.

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My bold ….

We think you are going to love Flickr under SmugMug ownership, but you can choose to not have your Flickr account and data transferred to SmugMug until May 25, 2018. If you want to keep your Flickr account and data from being transferred, you must go to your Flickr account to download the photos and videos you want to keep, then delete your account from your Account Settings by May 25, 2018.

This reads that all Flickr moves to SmugMug - and if it doesn’t your Flickr account will be deleted.

To my knowledge there is not a free SmugMug.

So is that going to be introduced after May 25th? Or will we all then be paying?

Again not me .. but …

I’m specifically not deleting my account because:

1. I intend to exercise a number of my data subject rights, and complain if Facebook does not respond appropriately.
   
2. I’m expecting the alternatives to Facebook to improve (because they’re virtually non-existent now), and will look forward to using data portability.

The following is an experiment using Siri to talk to Drafts which I will then publish to microblog. The idea works by use of special code inside of Drafts that allows you to talk to your device and it in turn happily translates that into text. The cool thing is that normally with Siri there is a time cut off. With Drafts you can keep on talking talking talking while it types and types and types. What it doesn’t seem to do is improve the ability of Siri to understand what you’re saying.

One step at a time.

The premise is simple: instead of owning your own bike, you can find and rent a JUMP bike directly in their app – each one has a built-in GPS. Bikes are scattered across the city, locked to racks, poles, or even trees.

An example of went wrong in China is below - and that doesn’t include bikes tied against trees, lamp posts and stop signs that will be all over San Francisco.

Thank-you dear tax payer - we will repurpose these ‘utilities’, make your city look like crap, probably cause accidents because we won’t be too careful about where we leave stuff …. oh and we are not responsible … you see we simply ‘facilitate bike sharing’.

The headline,

Josh Kushner’s healthcare start up

caught my eye, so I read on.

Oscar, the health insurance startup co-founded by Joshua Kushner and Mario Schlosser, has raised $165 million in new venture capital funding. A source puts the post-money valuation at $3.2 billion, which is up from $2.7 billion in early 2016.

Oh … not healthcare start up at all … health Insurance startup. I do find the conflation of these two very different businesses in the US not just confusing - but almost deliberately misleading.

…. and yes, Josh is the Kushner that you don’t read too much about.

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This is a great read … essentially talking about the many different initiatives around the globe working on creating meat to eat, independent of animal.

Then there is this where The US Cattlemen’s Association are essentially proposing that

FSIS exclude from the statutory definitions of “meat” and “beef” those products that are not “derived from animals born, raised, and harvested in the traditional manner.”

Personally, I am with the Cattlemen - we should be clear about where our food comes from … count me in on the side of ‘clear GMO labelling’ for example. But then I am also on the side of those Cattlemen being clear about where their animals come from … how they are treated … etc etc but they do tend to fight that - because really they are also against this kind of publicity:

But that all said - I am also interested in defining terms. Is meat something that is defined by process …. i.e. all meat comes from an animal or content / structure …. i.e. all meat is meat if it cannot be distinguished by scientific analysis.

I also full expect ‘brand' to enter the debate … after-all - I can make ‘Champagne’ anywhere in the world - and you will not be able to chemically or structurally separate it from Champagne made in Champagne - but of course we all know that only Champagne made in Champagne can actually be called Champagne. In other words - there is a prior case in the food world that process does NOT define what you can call something - only the source defines it. ON that basis - the Cattlemen might win.